California's third largest city is mostly empty roads | Hacker News Reader

California's third largest city is mostly empty roads

sfgate.com

90 pointskvee22 comments

Tom Scott on California City: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gO3LUhFwx6k

I never knew anything about this history. My great-grandfather moved from San Luis Potosi to Houston in the 1920s, and when that ended up not working out well, he taught himself stonemasonry and moved to California and built a house on land in the middle of absolute nowhere, which eventually became California City. I used to visit up there for a week every summer around Independence Day back in the 80s. Most of the family did not stay up there and ended up settling in and around East LA.

Interesting to think if this stupid idea had panned out. Would my family be wealthy land barons today just by virtue of settling in a place that boomed before it boomed? How many cities in the American west today are dominated by families that got lucky their desperate immigrant ancestor who had to settle in the frontier because they couldn't get work anywhere else happened to pick the right place a century before anyone could have known it was the right place?

Ironically, if it were to be built up, its currently amazing walkability would be completely ruined.

I mean look at it: you can go from any point A to any point B in a straight line, even if A and B are in the middle of distinct, unrelated culs-de-sac.

There's a fascinating podcast series about this place, which goes more into depth about its problem with land sale fraud: https://www.npr.org/podcasts/890392491/california-city

This was interesting to read about and am not familiar with California City at all. Before clicking was thinking San Jose, CA may be the third largest by population so not what was expected.

Regardless it's pretty crazy how diverse CA geography is and how different north and south climates are

Premature optimization is the root of all evil

China is going to experience this big time

>To this day, the city remains California’s third largest by land area.

This is largely beside the point of this, but the lack of clarity in words such as "largest" and "biggest" in this space bugs me. LA is so much bigger than NYC (size), NYC is so much larger than LA (population). You'll get various guides saying just one is for size, but I've seen both given.

It's a minor issue, but it's annoying in language.

Chongqing is the largest city in the world at 39 million people, but its mostly rural.

Chinese cities are not really "cities". They are closer to counties and in some instances like Chongqing, a literal province. The bigger cities are a administratively half a level above counties.

Ya, CQ is about the size of Maine, hardly just a city. Core urban CQ is only around 9.5 million people, which isn't that large by Chinese standards. Shanghai is much less rural at around 22-24 million people.

>It's a minor issue, but it's annoying in language.

Call it what it is: clickbait, an intentionally deceptive headline meant to get you to click.

As regions they are pretty similar population wise. At 100km radius (centring for maximimum population) LA is 18M people and NYC is 22M. It's clear why they are the cultural centres of the US. Chicago, Washington DC, and the Bay Area are next highest at ~10M each.

https://www.tomforth.co.uk/circlepopulations/

wait, what? Largest and biggest are synonyms. Why are you deciding that larger means "having more population"

I’d wager that most people would assume “largest city” meant “largest city [by population]” because that’s clearly what search results assume. “Largest city in USA” first lists the Wikipedia entry for “List of United States Cities by Population” [0], with the next bunch of results assuming the same thing. For me, the 9th result is the first to mention land area.[1]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-city-rankings/largest-c...

Jacksonville, Florida being the largest city has long been a trivia question that relies on this ambiguity. Based on the Wikipedia article, it looks like Anchorage is larger but maybe because it's a county equivalent, it's not considered a city in this context.

Maybe it’s just the contiguous US? Fun fact!

Jacksonville, FL, and Sitka, AK, are both “consolidated city-counties”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

A city is simply a collection of people, so it's natural to say that the biggest city is the one with the most people.

Not sure I can agree with that definition. A city remains a city even if every single inhabitant leaves it.

I'd be interesting to hear how a city can remain existent without citizens.

Not that I have a better definition - but I've always considered a city to be defined by it's buildings, rather than people.

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